Last trial of Dominick Dunne

Dominick Dunne is preening once more in a danse macabre of celebrity culture. The man he calls a murderer to his face, but whom he also thanks for making him "a name and a public person, which I love", is once again in the dock: OJ Simpson, the American football legend found 'not guilty' of killing his wife and her lover in the unlikely verdict of the 'trial of the century' in 1995, and now accused of armed robbery in Las Vegas.

But this time the lights have gone out, the photographers have abandoned the press pen in droves, and neither OJ, gone to seed and flabby, nor Dunne is bathed in the public attention they crave.

And this time it's Dunne himself who is cast in the shadow of the Grim Reaper, aged 83, ailing with bladder cancer. Courageously, he has defied even an emergency visit to the hospital to keep on the job, notebook in hand.

But there is something sad about the spectacle of Dunne, tired and mottled but still fussily dressed in imitation of the old-line Yankee Grandee he isn't really, sitting just inside the door to the courtroom, granted special dispensation by the judge to hurry in and out to meet his medical needs along the corridor.

For a quarter of a century Dunne has had no equal as the chronicler of the dark side of wealth and fame, the crime reporter to the glossy world of Vanity Fair magazine.

His monthly diary roams from one fabulous case to the next: Patrick Smith, the Kennedy cousin accused of date-rape, and William Skakel, the Kennedy cousin accused of murdering teenager Martha Moxley; the millionaire Menendez Brothers who slaughtered their parents for the cash, and Phil Spector, the impresario of pop accused of shooting a waitress; the trials of Claus von Bulow (above), not guilty of trying to murder his heiress wife, and the strange case of Lily Safra, whose Brazilian billionaire husband died in a fire in Monte Carlo.

"It is a fact of my life," Dunne writes in this month's 25th anniversary copy of Vanity Fair, "that I often know the principals of the trial I am covering and often move in the same circles."

He described his own defining moment in a column from the OJ murder trial when he complained of the exhaustion of going to Hollywood dinners every night to regale the stars with the latest news from the court. No party was complete without Dominick! When it was all over, he published a memoir: The Way We Lived Then: The Recollections of a Well Known Namedropper.

Dunne began life as a Hollywood stage manager/ producer, but admits that his main talent was as 'party-goer'. It was a role that led to rehab for booze and drug addiction, and even a brief spell in prison. After that, he lived in a mountain cabin and started writing crime novels.

He first set foot in a courtroom when his daughter, Dominique, was murdered. Her killer, a former boyfriend, was caught and tried but served only a few years in jail after his defence argued mitigating circumstances. Dunne has said that what he witnessed in that court "enraged and redirected me".

The day before the trial, he went to a dinner party and by chance met Tina Brown, who had just taken over Vanity Fair with a brief to re-invent a glossy magazine for a new age of celebrity. She commissioned his first court report, which became a book: Justice: A Father's Account of the Trial of his Daughter's Killer.

For all his grief, Dunne never looked back. And he has gone to Las Vegas to pay tribute to OJ (left), the man he acknowledges as his partner in fame, by witnessing one last trial. "I think," he says, "it would be a fitting way to end." Perhaps it is equally fitting that no one is paying much attention. ·